Customer Reviews

Dixie City Jam

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After reading a bunch of bestseller but lackluster mysteries this summer, it was wonderful to discover an author of some substance-James Lee Burke. Dixie City Jam (the Dave Robicheaux series) reads more like a mystery written by a novelist, and Burke's literary style is unmatched by most mystery writers today.

Dave Robicheaux, a former New Orleans PD policeman, is now a detective with the New Iberia sheriff's office. Robicheaux discovered a Nazi u-boat in Gulf waters, and now a number of people are lining up to find the sub's location. Will Buchalter is a spooky, brutal, neo-Nazi who is willing to stop at nothing to get his hands on the sub, and haunts Robicheaux and his family (leaving dead bodies in his wake). There are also several subplots involving drug deals, prostitution, mobsters, crooked cops, and a vigilante murderer killing drug dealers and cutting out their hearts.

Burke's characters are a colorful bunch, and Robicheaux's former partner and now PI, Cletus Purcel, is probably the best of the bunch. He will have you in stitches as he goes against the mob. New Orleans is also a major player in Dixie City Jam, and the sultry, sensuous, steamy city (the locals call it The Big Sleazy) provides a fitting backdrop.

Burke's writing is top notch, and his dialog between characters reads like Mike Hammer meets Spenser. Robicheaux has a background in literature (something rare in law enforcement) and it's easy to see that Burke is a serious writer who shares a love of literature with his fictional detective. Burke has received a number of deserved literary awards and was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

The only negative about Dixie City Jam is that some of it seemed a bit unbelievable. How Buchalter could have gone on a crime spree lasting decades while eluding detection or capture was a stretch. But this doesn't detract from this otherwise fabulous book. Burke is another writer who I'm now motivated to read everything he's written. I've already started Last Car to Elysian Fields.

It can be a terrible thing for the avid reader to discover the works of an already established and prolific author. If the author is not to the reader's taste, no problem exists; if, however, the author's work grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go, the reader is faced with the daunting task of reading everything else the author has written. Such is the case with James Lee Burke and his series of Dave Robicheaux novels; while I already have a sizable list of novels on my summer reading list, I am forced, after reading DIXIE CITY JAM, to seek out more of Burke's mystery novels.

DIXIE is set in and around the city of New Orleans (always a vivid setting for an atmospheric mystery). Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the Sheriff's Office who is juggling many balls at once. In addition to his police duties, he has been hired to locate a WW II U-boat that was sunk in local waters many years ago. He also has the added predicament of helping out his old comrade Clete Purcel stay alive as he constantly and foolishly aggravates local crime figures Max and Bobo Calucci. But things come to a head when he finds himself warding off the unwelcome advances of Will Buchalter, an enormous neo-Nazi who's ultimate motives for terrorizing Robicheaux's family remain frighteningly obscure.

Clearly, Burke has no problem with handling many different plot threads. The narrative leaps from element to element; an ailing gangster who wishes to make amends; a young man who is trying to become more than be believes he can be; an interrogation scene that will make the reader squirm. His management of these disparate elements is so skillful, so loaded with portent, that the eventual solution to Robicheaux's many dilemmas comes off as anti-climactic. In the genre of crime writing, perhaps only James Ellroy can be trusted to pull together myriad subplots into a satisfactory conclusion. But that doesn't mean it's not a travel worth taking. Burke shows a genuine flair for capturing the idioms of New Orleans speech; it may not be authentic, but in relation to the story, it is vital and alive. What may come across as precocious and obtrusive in a lesser writer is transformed in Burke's hands into true characterization and ambiance. The native patois becomes integral to the novel's success at presenting New Orleans as a character, rather than a setting.

Burke has crafted a marvelous variety of characters to inhabit his world. Robicheaux is a hero firmly entrenched in the classic detective mode, an honourable man, tough yet tender, who operates with one eye towards justice, and the other towards his own inner demons. Clete is an absurdly erratic yet loyal companion, a man who cannot control his own impulses, even at the risk of self-destruction. And among the wide diversity of supporting characters, none is more frightening or memorable than Buchalter, a creation of monstrous proportions. He is among the creepiest of psychopaths I can ever remember meeting in print, a pleasure/pain lover with severe racist overtones, a genuinely despicable monster with no redeeming qualities. It takes real craftsmanship to construct a portrait of evil so convincingly.

As I said, the ending, coming after multiple storylines involving mobsters, anti-Semitism, corrupt cops and blatant racism, seems a letdown. It wraps up the story convincingly, but perhaps it's a testament to Burke's abilities that it seems a shame to end the tale. As in all the great mysteries, Burke creates a world unto itself, rife with passion and rage. That the mystery can be solved at all is secondary to the people who inhabit the world. Burke's New Orleans is a dangerous place, a jungle of seething violence and corruption, a site on par with Ellroy's Los Angeles and Ian Rankin's Edinburgh. One can only hope his further explorations into Dave Robicheaux's universe remain as entertaining.

When I heard Will Patton's first sentence of my first Dave Robicheaux novel I really did feel that I was transported to New Orleans and southern La. Those wonderful full, round vowels, clipped d's and t's at the end of words, and the melodious, artistic descriptions paint a picture I can't get enough of. Now I'm waiting to get my hands on the next James Lee Burke masterpiece - especially with Patton reading. Don't worry about which of Burke's novels you're grabbing because eventually you'll read them all, one after another like not being able to stop eating pralines or fresh oysters!

I never read anything by James Lee Burke until I saw a piece on his new book in the August '05 edition of Esquire. I realized that I had never read anything in the 'tough guy' genre except a couple of Clive Cussler books when I was a teenager, so I picked up Dixie City Jam off a bargain bin at a local Barnes&Noble. It was a pleasant surprise, and I look forward to reading some of Burke's other stuff.

I enjoyed the melancholy feel of the author's settings: heavy, quiet, and forbidding in a way. The color descriptions were vivid, yet liquidy (if that is a word) as if Burke was trying to create a water color painting using the written word as his brush. The sentence, "...early sun looked like a sliver of pink ice above the horizon's misty rim..." is a good example. The book is full of colorful phrases like this. The author's characters, language, and violent descriptions are just as colorful. I won't bore you with examples, but it makes for an interesting book.

The story seemed like a wierd outlet for political and social commentary, but it worked. The book has plenty of interesting perspectives. Burke spent a paragragh describing the 'fat guy' on TV making fun of the homeless and the downtrodden in from of 18 million regular viewers. I wish the author had just come out and used Rush Limbaugh's name, but I guess he wanted to remain in the fictional genre. There was also a page describing the hypothetical character named Tyrone. That beautifully written piece is worth the price of the book.

The color, tone, characters, and settings more than make up for the books so-so plot (hence the four stars instead of five). The author's exporation of the dirty side of humanity allows people like me to take a brief glimpse in a fictional setting since i have no intention of wallowing in the real-life muck first hand.

It's a good book. I'd recommend it to anybody who is not sensitive to violence.

"Not many believe this, but in the early months of 1942, Nazi submarines used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for the tankers that sailed without naval escort from the oil refineries at Baton Rouge into the Gulf of Mexico."

With those intriguing opening lines, ex New Orleans policeman Dave Robicheaux is off on his seventh pulse pounding adventure. When Dave's friend, Batist, is arrested for the murder of a drug dealer in New Orleans, bail money is needed. In order to raise $10,000, Dave agrees to look for a Nazi submarine sunk in 1942.

Burke, a master of Cajun crime combines this with a treasure hunt, a woman in peril, the involvement of Dave's former partner in a Mafia vendetta, political maneuvering in the New Orleans police department, and a terrifying neo-Nazi villain.

Set in a New Orleans most of us have never seen, "Dixie City Jam" is a galvanizing, suspenseful, one-of-a-kind thriller that pulls the reader from page to page just as inexorably as the ol' Mississippi keeps rolling along.

- Gail Cooke

This was the first James Lee Burke novel I had ever read and it was so good that within a summer of reading Dixie City Jam, I had read all of his New Iberia novels. A beautifully detailed, exciting, well written myster. Burke is the best, I recommend this novel and all his other works

I went to a Borders reading with James Lee Burke and his humble, yet confident voice added new dimension to his characters...as if that's possible. Dave Robicheaux and his buddy Clete Purcel just about walk into the room anytime I open the pages of these books. Unfortunately, Burke's antagonists are just as palpable. The evil lurking beneath the surface of certain scenes is dark and frighteningly real. It's hard not to cheer for Robicheaux as he faces his foes and, usually, reacts before he thinks. Burke wraps this gritty realism and dialogue in some of the most beautiful and vivid metaphors around. Some accuse Burke's writing of shallow plotting, and I understand their viewpoint. I choose, though, to wander along with Dave Robicheaux through the heat and sound and smells of his day and see where it may lead us. Somehow this style gives his stories an uncharted realism that I personally appreciate. Like the cajun food Burke writes of, his words are alive with flavor and texture and subtlety beneath a layer of eye-popping spices. And--as his fans well know--your sense of smell will also be invited to the meal. Pull up a chair and savor some good Louisiana cooking.

For the first time in a long time, Dave Robicheaux's life seems to be going well. His wife Bootsie's Lupus is under control, his business is doing well as is his daughter Alafair. Then Dave sees an old german sub, sunk during WWII and all kinds of strange things begin to happen in his life.

This time the woman in Dave and Clete's lives are the targets of a lunatic, who has been murdering people all over the world. He has a compatriot who will surprise you later in the book. Most of the time Dave is busy chasing after this guy who seems to be a ghost and lives completely off the radar. No history or background and nothing in the NCIS computer files.

Clete has more fun in this book than is legal; he fills a guys car with cement from a stolen cement mixer, and drives an earth grader through the guys brothers house. In between he gets some great lines and gets to spend a week fishing, while Dave runs around southeastern Louisiana chasing his ghost.

As always, come the end, Dave works everything out; the good guys win and the bad guys get their just desserts. There is a great line from Stephen Crane in the book that I'll paraphrase as:

Most people aren't nouns, their adverbs, spending their time modifying situation and dangers they have no control over.

I've read four Dave Robicheaux novels so far, every one a winner. No complaints, only praise.

"Dixie City Jam" (1994) was the eighth novel published by American author James Lee Burke in his New York Times bestselling detective Dave Robicheaux series. Like the earlier books of the series, and most of the series' works to follow, the book, a Southern noir, police procedural/mystery, is set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, more or less home country for Burke, who was born in Houston, Texas, in 1936, and grew up on the Texas-Louisiana gulf coast.

In his previous work in this series, Burke has frequently mentioned a German submarine, sunk with all hands aboard during World War II, underwater in the Gulf of Mexico. So is the twisted wreckage of an oil rig that exploded while Robicheaux's father was working aboard: his father's body, too, is under the salt of the Gulf of Mexico, now so much in the news due to another recent oil rig explosion. In "Dixie City Jam," the buried Nazi submarine assumes central importance when Hippo Bimstone, a powerful Jewish activist from New Orleans, requests that Robicheaux, formerly of the New Orleans Police Department, now of the New Iberia Sheriff's Office, locate the sunken vessel. The beginning of Robicheaux's search is enough to draw a neo-Nazi psychopath, Will Buchalter, who insists that the Holocaust was a hoax, to town, and it seems Buchalter will stop at nothing to find the sub first. Buchalter is pretty much Burke's usual hit man/bad guy, funny-looking, homicidal, psychotic. Of course, this being a book by Burke, New Orleans wise guys soon start coming out of the woodwork too, for reasons of their own: we have here Tommie (Bobalouba) Lonighan, and the Calucci brothers, Max and Bobo. And, to be sure, Clete Purcel, Robicheaux's former partner on the New Orleans Police Department, an overweight, heavy-drinking, brawling, heavily-scarred survivor of the city's tough Irish Channel neighborhood, as are the gangsters, is around to help the detective. We'll also meet the Reverend Oswald Flat and his wife; and a mysterious nun, Sister Marie Guilbeaux, who may have more to do with Buchalter than is helpful for the detective. Then there are some good cops, such as Lucinda Bergeron, and some dirty cops, such as Nate Baxter.

Robicheaux is of Cajun ancestry, and is still reliving the nightmare of his service in Vietnam. He has a drinking problem, and a tendency to violence. In addition to working for the sheriff, he still owns and operates a boat rental and bait business, while living in the house in which he was actually born. He is assisted in the operation of his business by a black man, Batist, whom we've met before, and will see again. Robicheaux is, by this point, on his third wife, Bootsie, who has developed the generally fatal disease lupus. The detective's quietly, illegally adopted daughter, an ethnic Hispanic, whom he's named Alafair, has morphed into a fairly ordinary American teenager, and she's got her pet, the three-legged raccoon Tripod, whom we've met before and will meet again.

The novel at hand is rather longer than Burke's usual, and is shot through with discussion of New Orleans' music: Sam Philips' Memphis Sun Studios, where Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis got their starts. Jimmie Clanton's "Just a Dream" the most popular song on the jukebox in Robicheaux's salad year, 1957. And the locally- beloved Fat Man, Fats Domino. Burke also gives us a couple of pretty grotesque characters, a hallmark of Southern literature. He continues to write with energy, passion and power, and the longer length seems, if anything, to have given him a bigger canvas than usual to work upon. In fact, like Michael Connelly, the creator of a detective whom he named Hieronymus Bosch, after the great 16th century Dutch artist that used all his canvas to the corners, jamming it full of grotesque characters, Burke in this book seems to have used every inch of his larger canvas, and has himself given us some memorable grotesques.
More than anything else, seems to me, in Burke's work, we'll enjoy some of the most beautiful, knowledgeable writing ever committed to paper about the flora, fauna, geography, and human occupants of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, now so much in the news. Burke attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute; later received B. A. and M. A. degrees from the University of Missouri in 1958 and 1960 respectively. Over the years he worked as a landman for Sinclair Oil Company, a pipeliner, land surveyor, newspaper reporter, college English professor, social worker on Skid Row in Los Angeles, clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, and instructor in the U. S. Job Corps. His work has twice been awarded an Edgar for Best Crime Novel of the Year. At least eight of his novels, including the more recent Jolie Blon's Bounce, and Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux Mysteries) have been New York Times bestsellers. But "Dixie City Jam" is certainly one of the more outstanding books in this series.